Will Ferrell has made his name – and fortune – playing idiots. But don't be
fooled; there's more to Hollywood's favourite buffoon than meets the eye

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired Her Face Was Covered I and II, a video installation by the Israeli artist Omer Fast about the way in which language alters our perception of reality.

You may not be familiar with Fast’s work, but chances are you have heard of the donor. He is an American actor in his mid-40s who has been responsible for one of Hollywood’s bigger word-of-mouth hits of the last ten years, and also one of its more notorious flops.

Bizarre projects slip into production on his say-so, but his films routinely make blockbuster profits. Need one more clue? The most memorable moment of his breakthrough performance, in the 2003 Todd Phillips comedy Old School, was a 19-second shot of his bare bottom bobbing down the road and into the night.

So why is Will Ferrell, the star of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, buying abstract art for the galleries of Los Angeles? And how can the man we saw running around in his underpants in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, praying to Christ, Allah, ‘Jewish God’ and Tom Cruise, also be a discerning collector of mid-century Scandinavian furniture?

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Ferrell’s comedy – broad, brash, often backside-centric – resists analysis to its dying breath, but when you turn your attention to the man himself, you realise the same might apply. The son of Kay, a teacher, and Lee, the Righteous Brothers’ keyboard player, he grew up in a comfortable suburb of Orange County, California, with no apparent interest in the film industry that was beetling away 40 miles to the northwest.

His parents divorced when he was eight years old, although the split was amicable. “I was the type of kid who would say, ‘Hey, look on the bright side, we’ll have two Christmases!’” he once told Good Morning America – a line that found its way into Talladega Nights, where it was spoken by Ricky Bobby’s two young sons, Walker and Texas Ranger.

Ferrell studied for a career in sports broadcasting, but realised he might be able to make a living off his class-clown instincts when he was hauled on-stage at an improvisational gig. After consulting with his parents – “Just know that there’s a lot of luck involved,” Lee told him – he auditioned for and won a place in The Groundlings in 1991, a venerable Los Angeles improv troupe.

He was head-hunted by Saturday Night Live four years later, and met his wife Viveca Paulin, a Swedish fine art auctioneer, in the same year. They wed in 2000 and have three children together. These days, the Ferrells are familiar faces on the Los Angeles gallery circuit, and their immaculately furnished loft apartment in New York’s West Village, complete with Finnish Ottomans and a signed Roy Lichtenstein print, was recently featured in Architectural Digest.

Will Ferrell with Cheri Oteri during a Saturday Night Live skit in 1995 (Credit: NBC)

The problem with Lichtensteins is, they don’t come cheap, but when Ferrell left Saturday Night Live in 2002, he was the highest-paid cast member in the show’s history, earning a shade over £200,000 per year. Hollywood success followed almost overnight: first in league with the so-called Frat Pack (Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Jack Black, Vince Vaughn) and from Anchorman onwards, under his own steam. He can now reportedly command around £9 million per film, although for pet projects such as the Spanish-language soap-opera spoof Casa de Mi Padre, he is happy to work for much less.

That’s an unusually smooth road to stardom, and few tears of a clown appear to have been shed along the way. Could that be why his finest comic creations all share a keen sense of unearned invincibility? Ron Burgundy is a prehistoric bigot with a glittering career as a local newscaster; Ricky Bobby an imbecile and widely loved champion of the NASCAR circuit; Buddy a human orphan raised by Santa’s elves in a state of blissful naivety.

Plenty of comedians have built careers on playing idiots, from Sacha Baron Cohen to Zach Galifianakis, what makes Ferrell’s idiots unique is that their idiocy seldom holds them back: for them, success is something to be blundered into, then milked for all its worth. Ron Burgundy’s stardom is an inexplicable fact: whether he actually deserves it is neither here nor there.

Will Ferrell as the naive Buddy in Elf (Credit: New Line/Everett / Rex Features)

And confidence, as they say, breeds success. Burgundy is almost as adored in the real world as he is in the film’s version of mid-1970s San Diego. Anchorman made a not-unrespectable £55 million at the box office in 2004 (it was made for £16 million) but went on to find an enormous and appreciative audience on DVD. This month sees the release of the sequel – the first of Ferrell’s career, if you don’t count a feature’s-worth of Anchorman outtakes, stitched together for a tie-in DVD – and Paramount will be hoping that the first film’s fanbase is ready to queue.

A hit at this point would certainly be useful for Ferrell. His career is hardly in jeopardy, but of his last five films, only one, the buddy cop comedy The Other Guys, was an unqualified success. Another was his indulgent remake of the 1970s children’s television series Land of the Lost, one of the decade’s notable bombs, and which was later described by Ron Meyer, the president of the studio, as “just crap…there was no excuse for it”.

But when Ferrell hits a bad film, he bounces. From Semi-Pro, an underpowered basketball comedy, he moved on to Step Brothers, a sustained improvisational wig-out about two stay-at-home sons who have reached middle-age. Step Brothers split critics and audiences on release – I’m stridently pro, although others found it too madcap – but it’s certainly the purest expression of Ferrell’s comic style. Step Brothers was directed by Adam McKay, a long-time collaborator from Ferrell’s Saturday Night Live days, and co-stars John C. Reilly, one of the few performers who can match Ferrell’s ever-escalating silliness.

McKay also worked with Ferrell on a project that is helping to change the way in which comedy is consumed: the website Funny or Die, where professional and amateur comedians share short films with around four million visitors a month. The site was launched in 2007 with a two-and-a-half-minute short called The Landlord, in which Ferrell is harangued over a late rent payment by McKay’s two-year-old daughter Pearl. (“I want my money, b----!” she chirps. “I need to get my drink on.”)

Five years on, Funny or Die has an annual turnover of around £25 million, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Ferrell is sold on the viral video format. Last year, he appeared in a series of nonsensical and extraordinarily cheap-looking adverts for Old Milwaukee, an unfashionable brand of American beer, which were screened only in certain corners of Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Wisconsin. Ferrell followed this with a second, even stranger campaign that was broadcast only in Sweden, where the beer is unavailable.

At first sight the adverts look like a situationist prank at the brewery’s expense, although it seems highly likely that they fall under a promotional deal signed in 2010 between Pabst Brewing, Old Milwaukee’s parent company, and Funny or Die’s in-house creative team. If so, then what a pact: the brand wins itself a famous spokesman while Ferrell holds onto his credibility by conspicuously torching it.

A result like that is only possible in Ferrell’s comedy: it’s divorced from reality twice over, and sets obviously silly rules that are broken without a second thought. Perhaps my favourite line in all of his work comes from a scene in Step Brothers, trimmed out of the original cut, in which Brennan eats a tray of ice topped with mustard. He takes a cube in his mouth and then spits it back onto the plate with a puzzled look: “That’s a bad piece of ice,” he shrugs.

Nothing in that moment makes sense, but here’s why I snort whenever I think of it: even the way in which it doesn’t make sense doesn’t make sense. To see reality bent by language into gleeful abstractions, who says you have to go to an art gallery?